7 years ago, some guy wrote a novella in 24 hours

In August 2005, I participated in something called Blogathon, a 24-hour blogging marathon for charity. In the span of 24 hours, participants had to write a new post every 30 minutes. For a pre-Twitter/ Facebook era, that was quite a difficult thing to do.

I had just turned 21, my lifelong dreams of filmmaking were still far from reality. I was a mere university student studying in Perth who dabbled in video-making with his camcorder. In order to do something awesome, I dragged in my high school friend Yuan-Yue as well, so that we would take turns posting instead.

She would post a random drawing.

I would write something random based on the random drawing.

The initial plan was just to write limericks, poems, haiku, or something simple.

But we ended up with a novella.
I called it THE COTTAGE AT THE END OF TIME because I had no time to think of a different title. It is a story of a lovelorn guy... trapped in a cottage at the end of time.

The whole thing was an act of spontaneity where we worked entirely on our own instincts. Nothing was planned. Yuan-Yue was in London, I was in Perth. We didn't know what each of us were going to do.

It's still quite unbelievable to see something somewhat coherent (relatively speaking) coming out of this. (of course, this would serve as a precursor for my own improvisational filmmaking methods since then)

For the past 7 years, each of the 48 blog posts we did during Blogathon had remained in my blog, until I realized recently that Yuan-Yue's illustrations were all gone.

So I deleted all these old posts and replace it with a single post featuring a link to where you can download the whole novella for your, er, reading enjoyment.

Long ago, before Edmund Yeo was sure he could become a filmmaker, he had aspirations of becoming a novelist. This was what he wrote.